France, October 30, 2010: Unknown perpetrators in the night from Friday 10/29/2010 to Saturday 10/30/2010 attacked a Roma camp in the small Parisian suburb of Triel-sur-Seine.

The masked attackers, armed with firearms and batons, entered the camp with a car fitted with a blue light.

The unknown perpetrators who, according to residents of the camp, were “dressed just like police officers” forced entry to the caravans of the Roma who originate from Romania. One woman claimed that she was forced to undress and many residents of the camp claim that those fake cops took their identity documents from them.

The perpetrators said to have discharged several rounds from their guns into the air and after about half an hour finally left the scene.

According to agency reports around thirty Roma families are living on a private piece of land for a number of years already under constant threat of forced removal on the plain of Triel-Chanteloup, an otherwise rather posh suburb of Paris, and have already for a long time requested from the authorities that they be given access to municipal water or alternative accommodation.

This story obviously has two rather sinister connotations. One is that probably right-wingers pretending to be police officers have attacked this camp or, two, that the attackers were, in fact, police officers and not fake cops at all.

Either way, this is a rather worrying state of affairs for any of us, whatever minority or race we may happen to be, other that white, and, probably, not just in France.

Acts such as those could happen anywhere and the reason that I am saying that there could be the possibility that those attackers were, in fact, real cops is that incidents like that have happened in Britain, in a particular South-Eastern county, at a more or less regular basis. On incident that I am aware of was perpetrated by officers on their way home from an exercise. Something that was vehemently denied by the chief of the county's police despite of evidence to the contrary.

Methinks that the Romani People in Europe have to be very much on their guard again, especially those of us that still travel, regardless from where in Europe we may come and where we may be.

The dark clouds of racism and xenophobia and of fascism, once again, gather over Europe and the actions against the Romani People in many countries of the European Union is ample proof of that.

We had hoped, like Viviane Reding of the Council of Europe said in her condemnation of the actions of the French government against Gypsies in its country, that those scenes would be a thing of the past; of the darkest times of the history of Europe.

But, alas, as I have been predicting for years, the past is coming back to haunt us because we never buried it properly.

When it comes to us, the Gypsy, all the legislations and all the talk of equality and all that jazz are nothing but empty words. To the powers that be and the majority of the Gadje per se we are and remain but the dirty Gypsy.

Now, in the economic climate of the Great Recession, the Gypsy is made to be the scapegoat for all of society's ills. The Gypsy takes away jobs, the Gypsy does this and the Gypsy does that. I am waiting when we are being accused, once again, of poisoning wells, carrying the Plague and being spies for the Turks or whoever.

While I am the first to admit that there are bad apples in the barrel of the Romani People that are involved in criminal activities, from low-level to very serious stuff, this does not mean that every Gypsy is a thief or even a child-trafficker.

However, the way the governments of many European Union member states behave it will be community punishments for those few that are involved in crimes. This is the same what happened under the Nazis in Germany and elsewhere. And the EU does what? Precisely...

In fact, to all intents and purposes, it is beginning to look as if we are seeing “ethnic cleansing by proxy” here in many of the EU member states on the European mainland. This is worrying and scary at the same time.

In Switzerland anti-Gypsy xenophobia is spreading too, but then again it was in Switzerland where Gypsy children were routinely stolen from their parents and placed in institutions and sold as slaves to farmers well into the second half of the twentieth century.

Is the entire European mainland about to go mentally deranged once again as far as the Gypsy is concerned? It would appear thus. And the world had thought that that was all behind us.

For years I have been saying that I could see the spectre of anti-Gypsyism of the Nazi kind rising in Europe again and that I could see the EU as, more than likely, having a part in such persecutions even and everyone thought me to be out of my mind. Looks like my fears are coming true, unfortunately.

And what do our “leaders? Where are the IRU and where is the ERTF? Conspicuous by their silence and this silence is really deafening and it proves where they really stand and what really counts for them; power and money. The People are but a means to an end for them.

The grassroots let it happen too and are lethargic as always. If we do not make a stand now then we deserve no better than to be seen as a People as scroungers and whatever else.

While we may be Stini or Cale and not Roma we are, nevertheless, all Romani and hence cousins and that alone should make us do something but...